Saturday, September 20, 2008

WAR: the clumping is getting worse

The server clumping in WAR seems to be getting worse. A lot of the servers are never getting past "low" population, and others servers have constant ques. I have three destruction characters on a low pop server between the levels of 5 and 8, and I may be forced to abandon them. It's getting harder and harder to get public quests done. At prime time there weren't enough players to do the first PQ in the Chaos starter area. We could get to the boss, who would promptly melt our faces.

Switched over to my high pop order server, and it was night and day. Rolled a new alt, and had a green bag and all my influence in the first PQ in less than 20 minutes. It was a total blast, and really made me think about ditching my existing destruction toons and restarting that faction on a high pop server. I can't be the only one that's feeling that way.

WAR's greatest strength is that it encourages you to group by making it painless, rewarding, and a hell of a lot of fun. It's begginning to look to me like that will also be the achilles heal of low pop servers, and perhaps the newbie game in a few months. The best parts of the game need a certain critical mass of players before they become accessible. It will be interesting to see what, if anything, Mythic does about this in the weeks ahead. I suspect that cloning servers isn't going to be nearly enough.